The Royal Mail: A Passion for the Post

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For 400 years the delivery of letters has been integral to British life. As Royal Mail confronts an uncertain future, Susan Whyman charts the Post Office’s development and discovers, through the correspondence of ordinary people, just how much letter writing meant to them.


The Post Office has aroused passions in every century and it still does today. This was demonstrated by the response to the government’s recent plans to sell off part of the Royal Mail. Email may have transformed the way we send messages, yet efforts to save local post offices reveal deep-seated attachments. They suggest that the Post Office is a cherished social institution whose service means more than just the delivery of a letter.


This was as true in the 18th century,when developments in literacy, trade, transport and growth of empire heightened the need for mail. The experiences of a young Scot, Joseph Morton, illustrate this point. In 1765 he left his family in Kelso to settle in a Cumbrian village where he hoped to find work as a gardener. Throughout his 124-mile journey to Kendal he carried letters to friends and received sorely needed meals in return.Morton’s first two letters to his family gave detailed instructions on how to address his mail so as not to incur the double postage that was charged if more than one sheet of paper were included: ‘Write at the Bottom (Single Sheet),’ he instructed his family,‘as you see I have done.’ One letter was sent part way by the local carrier,who delivered goods privately; the other wholly by post: ‘Let me know,’ he wrote with a concern for cost,‘whither this or the other was Dearest.’

Morton’s knowledge of postal practices was not unusual for his time and class. Over the next 21 years, though he was often out of work, he wrote constantly to his parents, spelling his words out phonetically. Letter writing was a normal and indispensable part of the way he coped with life. In fact Morton adjusted his own routines to mesh with the rhythms of the post. Even in times of severe poverty, he and others like him, found makeshift ways to send letters, assisted by friends, servants, porters, newsmen, hawkers or carriers. When Morton fell into debt and his prospects seemed poor, his letters brought emotional comfort and family assistance. In better times they helped him to find stable employment as a clerk for a coalmine owner.

Similar enthusiasm for the post is reflected in contemporary novels. It was only natural for Jane Fairfax to remark in Jane Austen’s Emma (1815):

The post-office is a wonderful establishment … So seldom that a letter, among the thousands that are constantly passing about the Kingdom, is ever carried wrong – and not one in a million, I suppose actually lost! And when one considers the variety of hands, and of bad hands too, that are to be deciphered, it increases the wonder.

In the eyes of middling sort of people, like Jane Fairfax and workers like Joseph Morton, the Post Office was, indeed, a wonder of the world.

Yet the postal service was not originally designed for public use. It emerged haphazardly in the 16th century to provide horses and messengers in times of war for Henry VIII. A major aim was to establish a government monopoly over the gathering and censoring of information and mail.As well as controlling the flow of intelligence, it would oversee the delivery of diplomatic correspondence, support foreign and domestic policy and help to raise revenue. The king’s first Master of the Posts, Sir Brian Tuke (d.1545), selected local postmasters and divided the six major roads from London into stages.

Increased literacy, trade and an interest in news soon led merchants and the public to demand access to the post. But it wasn’t until 1635 that a London merchant Thomas Witherings (d.1651) offered a proposal to organise the first postal system for public use.A Royal Proclamation for the ‘settling of the Letter-Office of England and Scotland’ gave Witherings the authority to establish fixed, regular posts. Each post town had its own mail bag to and from London,while foot posts carried letters further on. The central London office at Bishopsgate co-ordinated mail on six main roads, charging 2d a letter for up to 80 miles.

After foundering during the Civil War, Witherings’ plan was re-instated in 1657 and posts set up by rival entrepreneurs were shut down.After the Restoration in 1660 Charles II intensified intelligence activities on post roads that passed through London. Secretaries of State were given the right to open letters. It was rumoured that state employees could take impressions of seals, imitate writing perfectly and copy a letter in a minute by pressing damp tissue paper over the ink.At the same time, the Six Clerks of the Road in London were informally allowed to frank newspapers to local postmasters, who provided drink, gossip and horses, as well as news. This right to send newspapers postage-free led to profits for the six clerks and reduced prices of papers for readers. It would have a profound effect on the spread of newspapers. Paradoxically, the roles of the Post Office as both a censor and newsagent coexisted throughout the century.

By the 1670s mail procedures were established with 43 employees in the inland office,which had moved to Lombard Street in 1678. They managed mails leaving three times a week on the six great post roads: the Kent Road to Dover and the packet boats; the Yarmouth Road; the North Road to Edinburgh; the Chester Road to Holyhead; the Bristol Road and the Western Road to Plymouth. Letters were handed into the Letter Office in Lombard Street at two main windows where a clerk and alphabet keeper sorted London letters by place names for rapid delivery.

Country letters that passed through London were sorted and directed to one of the six roads. Postage due at delivery was written across the address for the recipient to pay. If it was suspected that more than one sheet of paper was enclosed, envelopes were held up to a candle and extra was charged for each additional sheet therein. The key event lay in the reckoning of accounts when letters passed through several checks before they left the central Post Office. They were then put into leather bags, one for each post town, ‘making one great Maile, buckled and sealed’. When the mail reached the first post town the postmaster took out his bag and recorded the time it was received. These early practices created a basic structure for delivering letters.

In the 1680s the postal monopoly was shattered when a London Custom House official,William Dockwra (c.1635-1716), and his anti-government Whig supporters developed and operated the London Penny Post. This was the first service to deliver mail between different parts of the capital and it facilitated the dissemination of pamphlets and news at a time when government restrictions were temporarily relaxed.A letter brought in at 8am was stamped an hour later and received around 10 o’clock for a penny. With deliveries up to ten times a day, Dockwra’s post became a model for future service and was absorbed into the Royal Mail in 1682. The Glorious Revolution of 1688 led to freer communication and a surge in postal income. In 1700 the Penny Post is estimated to have carried a million items. Because the average speed of country mail remained slow at three to four miles an hour, it still took Londoners at least five days to write and receive an answer from Manchester, Plymouth and Chester. Letters of complaint suggest that public service was still a secondary goal to fulfilling official objectives.

In 1711 a Post Office Act enabled the Royal Mail to expand along with the nascent British Empire. It became the hub of an imperial communication network, the government’s ‘mouthpiece, eyes, and ears’ and a source of patronage employing officials, postmasters, sailors and a large fleet of packet boats. From 1695 the Royal Mail was overseen by the Treasury and from 1691 it was administered by two Postmasters General – a Whig and a Tory.However, profits remained static due to huge operating costs, the drain of revenue into pensions for royal favourites and the difficulty of effecting reforms in a politicised institution.

During the 18th century, the efforts of two private entrepreneurs contributed to the improved finances and better management of the postal service. Between 1720 and 1760, Ralph Allen of Bath (1693- 1764) created a new system of bye- and cross-routes that connected the six main post roads and turned them into a national network. The old structure that had forced all mail to flow through London was radically transformed.Now a letter from York was sent directly to Newcastle without having to travel via London. Since the amount of postage due on each letter was based on distance, postage costs as well as delivery times fell.Allen also established daily posts from London, reduced fraud and increased average speeds to an average of five miles per hour. By 1764, important centres received mail six times a week.As Allen claimed, postmarks show letters arriving four days earlier than they had in the past in isolated northern villages. In 1756 a directory listed 200 post towns. By 1801 there were 907 in England and Wales.

In the 1780s a further leap was made in response to public pressure by another businessman of Bath, John Palmer (1742-1818). Palmer’s coaches replaced plodding post boys and produced ‘the mail coach era’. Two years after trial runs in 1784, coaches traversed the nation. Letters sent on Monday now received replies on Wednesday. Robert Johnson of Kenilworth noted the difference:

Palmer’s plan of the mail coaches is now established and the expedition they travel with is astonishing. We have the evening papers here, the morning after they are printed.

The real advantage was convenience to the public, rather than profit, noted Prime Minister William Pitt in 1790, confirming the Post Office’s role as a public servant. By 1800 a solid foundation for a more modern system had been created.

What impact did these postal improvements have on individual letter writers? The comments of ordinary people – from middling sorts to paupers – reveal what they thought about the post, how they used it and why it was important to their lives. Though attitudes were not always positive, the personal rhythms of daily life were intimately connected to postal routines. People wrote at particular hours on specific days because they needed to send and receive mail to cope with practical concerns. Thus in 1748 a stone merchant reported:

My exertions are all timed in what I call the long post between fryday night and Tuesday night, that no letters may remain unanswered that of necessity require it.

Necessity is the word to notice, but the post also brought him luxuries.His ‘packets of the middle part of [Alexander Pope’s] Dunciad’were kept back one post, because they were not sealed by nine o’clock.

The importance of mail is reflected further in the psychological dependence on letters that governed people’s emotional lives. A family of poor Quaker basket makers in Leicestershire feared their children had lost their faith until they finally received a letter in 1775.‘Many fears & doubts had Passed our poor minds’, they confessed. ‘But thy saying that no Accident had befallen thee [removed] those painful Apprehentions that had troubled us concerning thee.’ ‘Spirits low … till I hear from you’, wrote a cotton merchant’s wife in 1788. ‘I am much happyer since the post came’,wrote another, ‘for you know I am the grandest cowerd in the wourld.’

Lovesick writers of every rank were passionate about their letters.A Yorkshire bridle maker, John Fawdington, wrote of love as he sold his saddles in 1786. If he had no letter, he swore, he would ‘be ready to scold the Post boy for not driving as if he had a design against his neck.’ Edward Baker, a mathematical instrument maker, grieved when his lover refused to write for fear of embracing his ‘Popery’.

Sailors and their wives also relied on mail. In 1708 John Starke moaned from Virginia: ‘I am gott into a Tag end of the world where little … English Transactions appear.’ Letters to ‘Thomas Bowrey, Sea Captain of London’were sent on to him by his wife in 1697 ‘on Board ye St George Gally riding In ye downs. If ye ship be gone, to be returned to Mrs Mary Bowrey att Mr Gardiners an apothecary.’Merchants were especially dependent on letters: ‘We live here in a state between hope & fear on ye present crisis of our affairs’, wrote a trader from Weymouth.‘I shall impatiently expect Saturday’s post.’When the Lancashire flax merchant Thomas Langton travelled, he checked the nearest post office for mail. In 1780 he had to cut short a family tour of the Lakes when a business letter failed to arrive.

From the start, people wrote letters of complaint about slow posts, lost mail, uncertain deliveries and high postage rates. The author Thomas Edwards ‘thought every post as tedious as a tired horse’, as he waited for proofs from his publisher in 1748.Yet a sample of letters of the 1720s and 1730s with postmarks and dates of receipt show towns on central post roads received mail from London in as little as two days.After Allen’s reforms, the Legards in York received London letters in three days. The journey to Sheffield took four days in 1760; after Palmer’s reforms a fast coach could make the journey in 26 hours. These were optimal times, but they show what was possible. In 1779, mail from Venice reached the Johnsons in Bath in under three weeks. By 1800 Paris to Bath mail arrived in less than one. Waiting caused anxiety but theft of mail was worse. Postal records cite prosecutions for theft, armed robbery, overcharging for postage, forging franks, embezzlement and the destruction of letters.But by 1776, Barbara Johnson of Thenford was happy to have her money sent by post.‘The best method of conveyance will be in a Draught by the Post,’ she wrote.‘I believe the Post is pretty secure.’Yet people still mailed halves of Bank of England notes separately to avoid theft.

During the 18th century people learned to address letters in ways that made delivery more reliable. The poor took great pains and were well informed about postal practices. ‘Dirct to Armin nigh Rawcliff by Doncaster bag,’wrote a London pauper phonetically. In 1768 poor Ann Clark of Bermondsey was even more thorough:

Plees to Derect For me to bee Left at the son in Wite street neer sant gorges church in the Boorow Sourthwork Pray send an answer By the next post.

There were also provisions in the system to encourage safe delivery. Requests could be made to forward and collect mail and there were close personal contacts between postmasters and their communities. ‘The postman has waited,’wrote a tired Dorsetshire merchant in 1733, ‘ever since I began this letter.’

Nonetheless, rapidly rising postage costs presented problems. Even the rich kept detailed records of amounts of postage paid.Merchants,who had to enclose bills in correspondence,wrote angry letters to the central Post Office demanding relief from paying extra for each sheet. In 1752 an official reported that merchants and manufacturers in trading towns were disputing charges of double postage for letters: ‘Only if they are over 1 ounce will they pay.’

Though it is assumed that letters were a forbidden luxury for the poor, they still found ways to send them. This is confirmed by large collections of late-18th- and 19th-century paupers’ letters which survive in local archives; some painstakingly composed phonetically, others written by scribes and friends. In the hope that the churchwardens would send her money, poor law authorities in London prepaid Catherine Jones’s letter that begged relief from another parish in 1758.

People of all classes developed ingenious strategies, many of them illegal, to avoid paying postage. Letters to merchants were sent to Europe for forwarding back to England. Others were hidden in loads of books, butter or clothes. A government report in 1797 acknowledged the problem:‘Whatever penalties are held out to Coachmen, &c. carrying Parcels, the Public … will send by the … most expeditious conveyance, to the very great loss of the revenue of the Post Office.’

One widely used, less costly, alternative was sending mail by carriers whose fees were usually cheaper than the post.‘Ye Carrier comes Every weeke,’ noted the Quaker,George Taylor,‘& I shall have as much brought me for 2d. as I pay to post 2 or 3 shillings.’When Francis Wise’s diploma was to be sent by post,Wise crossed out ‘post’ and inserted ‘carrier’.A Northampton spinster also used provincial newsmen,who were ‘a safe conveyance for anything’.Merchants chafed under what they considered unfair treatment.Robert Pease of Hull slipped letters into London orders, noting: ‘Whenever you send me a parcell you had better put a Letter in it’. The Strutts of Derby put theirs in the bags of carriers, who served the hosiery business. All classes used messengers and the rich loaned theirs to others.

Sending letters postage-free by using a Member of Parliament’s frank (his signature, ensuring conveyance without charge) spread like wildfire. From 1711-61 franked letters increased 700 per cent while paid letters grew only by half. A London widow, Elizabeth Adams, used ‘frank cases’, apparently signed covers that were wrapped around letters. ‘A letter sent by post is a subject of apology,’wrote William Strutt in the 1770s, ‘a relative’s frank a rare gift.’ In 1764, a loophole in an Act to reduce franking allowed others to sign franks for MPs.As a consequence, the Post Office was soon flooded with orders from printers and booksellers. Newspapers franked from London rose from one million before the Act came into effect to over 8.5 million in 1796. The Royal Mail had unintentionally become a commercial newsagent for the nation. This was an egalitarian project that ran counter to the Post Office’s role as censor. Though it continued to open letters of government opponents, it was unable to control the powerful communications system that its own efforts had created.

As the Post Office developed, people wanted greater access to it. Their letters demanding this were infused with a sense of entitlement,which in turn fed into a debate about the function of the Post Office and how its many roles should be balanced with the duty to provide a public service. Disputes about this and who should pay for new services reached a crisis in 1774. Courts ruled that the Royal Mail could no longer charge an extra penny for home delivery within towns. Comments by a King’s Bench Justice show the shift that had taken place about the Royal Mail’s public role: ‘It is better that the Post Master … should undergo Inconveniences than all the people should.’

This new way of thinking stoked postal officials’ fears about the increased costs of universal carriage. Who would become a postmaster, one administrator asked, if he was forced to carry letters ‘to every hole and courner of the country’? This was an inclusive idea that was striking for its time. It showed that a service created to censor mail had become a private necessity and a public right.

By the 1790s coaches crammed with letters and newspapers sped throughout the nation. Inertia, corruption and obsolete practices still hindered the post but the public had become a driving force for change. Manufacturing towns were sending mass petitions to the Secretary of the Post Office in London requesting new routes, offices and postmasters. Individuals also wrote passionate letters demanding access to the post. In 1792, for example, Secretary Francis Freeling received an angry message from a Midland merchant, Mr Gannatt of Dudley. Gannatt had to leave a letter containing a large bill at an alehouse because the town had no postmaster. This was contrary, he noted, to the new regulations recently adopted by the Post Office. Gannatt wrote proudly of Dudley’s manufactures, navigable canals and excise revenue of £43,000.He insisted that great numbers of inhabitants were sending letters privately and implored Freeling to appoint a postmaster. It is significant that Freeling read and commented on these pleas and often granted the requests.

Another ardent letter was sent to Anthony Todd, Secretary of the Post Office from 1762 to 1765 and 1768 to 1798. It contained a petition from inhabitants of St Andrews for a new postal route from there to Anstruther. Though the towns were only nine miles apart, residents had to send mail via Edinburgh, a circuit of 100 miles.Todd agreed, though he thought the change would decrease revenue,‘on account of the general accommodation it will give … to that part of the country’. A service created to censor mail was now dedicated to its role as a public servant.

This history should be kept in mind as the Royal Mail faces crises arising from a breathtaking surge in technology.Deep-seated attachments to the post are a product of centuries of public engagement.Complaints about services in its early stages of development were, in fact, indicators of its importance. In our own time, the Post Office remains a unique social institution that binds people together locally while enabling them to communicate much further afield. Sir Walter Scott was aware of this when he composed The Antiquary in 1816. Looking back to the 1790s, he wrote:

We beg leave to transport the reader to the back-parlour of the post-master’s house at Fairport, where his wife … was employed in assorting for delivery letters which had come by the Edinburgh post. This is very often in country towns the period of the day when gossips find it particularly agreeable to call on the man or woman of letters, in order … to amuse themselves with gleaning information, or forming conjectures about the correspondence and affairs of their neighbours.

After examining the outsides (and often insides) of incoming letters, Fairport’s inhabitants were able to reconstruct the hidden relationships of their fellow citizens. The information that they gleaned that way ‘flew next morning through an hundred channels and in an hundred varieties through the world of Fairport.’

Scott’s cameo may be nostalgic, but it also illuminates the past. When discussing the future of the Royal Mail,we should not forget the public’s long and passionate love affair with the post.


Susan Whyman is an independent scholar, formerly of Princeton University. Her latest book The Pen and the People: English Letter Writers 1660-1800 has just been published by OUP.

Further Reading Philip Beale, A History of the Post in England from the Romans to the Stuarts (Ashgate, 1998); Frederick Wilkinson, Royal Mail Coaches: An Illustrated History (Tempus, 2007); Sir Walter Scott, The Antiquary (Constable, 1816); The British Postal Museum and Archive website. For further articles on this subject, visit: http://www.historytoday.com/modernbritain" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;